Bible and Sword (43 page)

“I was sweating blood and trying to find some less ponderous way of expressing myself.… Suddenly I said: ‘Mr.
Balfour, supposing I were to offer you Paris instead of London, would you take it?’

“He sat up, looked at me and answered: ‘But, Dr. Weizmann, we have London.’

“ ‘That is true,’ I said. ‘But we had Jerusalem when London was a marsh.’

“He leaned back and continued to stare at me.… I did not see him again till 1914.”

Weizmann’s emphasis on Palestine as the center of a faith, his curiously just phrase that a swerving away from it was a form of idolatry, would have bored or bewildered Joe Chamberlain, but it was exactly right for Balfour. “Balfour told me often,” writes Mrs. Dugdale, “about the impression the conversation made on him” and how from that time he understood that the Jewish form of patriotism would never be satisfied with anything less than Palestine.

Balfour understood Weizmann. Later, during the war years, the acquaintance was renewed and became intimate. “A statesman with his heart in science,” said Storrs, “would take refuge from party routine with a scientist whose soul was in politics and the first seeds of sympathy were sown.” At the end when Balfour lay dying, Weizmann was the only friend outside his family circle admitted to see him. “No words passed between them for Balfour was very weak and Dr. Weizmann much overcome.” Balfour moved his hand and touched the bowed head of his visitor. In the silence of the room the bond between them could be felt.

Because Weizmann represented the unassimilated Jews who accounted for the bulk of the Zionists, he personified their cause in Balfour’s eyes. Never excitable, never extravagant like Herzl, Weizmann was suave, immensely intelligent, and a shrewd negotiator, a “minimalist” who scaled his demands to what was practically obtainable. He was the possessor, too, of a charm as magnetic as Balfour’s own. His personality, one suspects, caused Balfour rather to romanticize the movement. “As guardians of a continuity
of religious and racial tradition” the Zionists were, Balfour decided, “a great conservative force in world politics.”

Immediately following the fateful meeting of the two personalities at Manchester in 1906 Balfour’s party lost the general election, and Balfour was freed from the duties of public office. He turned “with the ardor he reserved for his speculative moments” (to quote Mrs. Dugdale) to the new subject that had caught his interest.

Here, he saw, was an opportunity not only of bringing the Holy Land back to life out of the desolation of Moslem rule, but also of “doing something material to wash out an ancient stain upon our own civilization.” The phrase is his own, from a critical speech in the House of Lords in 1922, when a well-supported motion to reject the Mandate was under debate. Rising to oppose the motion, Balfour on that occasion produced the one serious defense that he ever attempted of the policy in Palestine that bore his name. He would be unfair to himself, he said at the end, if he sat down “without insisting to the utmost of my ability” that there was a great ideal involved in Britain’s sponsorship of the Jews’ return to their homeland. “This is the ideal which chiefly moves me … that Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule, those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race.”

Back in the early days of his study of Zionism Balfour was faced with the antipathy of the Jews of his own acquaintance, who were, almost to a man, frigidly anti-Zionist. Never himself having felt insecure, never having known any challenge or possibility of challenge to his own social position, Balfour was unable to understand what upset them so. He questioned Lady Constance, who was visiting Whittingame again in 1911. “A. J. B. is hugely interested
in all Jewish questions,” she wrote to her sister. “He asked a great deal about Claude [Montefiore; the intellectual leader of the assimilationist group in London]—his books, his attitude, his influence. He wanted me to tell him how C. stood with the Community and how his writings affected the Jewish question.” Regrettably, Lady Constance adds, A. J. B. “gets a good deal of information from Natty, naturally very one-sided.” The reference is to her cousin Nathaniel, first Lord Rothschild, who, since his contact with Herzl, had become too favorable to the cause, at least in the opinion of the lesser, or intermarrying, Rothschilds. Natty’s son was later to be the recipient of the Balfour Declaration, which was issued in the form of a “letter to Lord Rothschild.” But most of the English Jews shared the attitude implicit in Lady Constance’s
Reminiscences
as well as in another book of memoirs about her family, both published after the event, which, despite their frequent mention of Balfour himself, pass over the Balfour Declaration in tight-lipped silence.

This attitude was to leave its mark on history when its bitter-end spokesman, Mr. Edwin Montagu, was able, from his post in the War Cabinet, not to stop the Declaration altogether, but at least so to blur its wording as to leave unclear and forever controversial exactly what its drafters had in mind. The fatal results of this evasion will appear later. The rationale of the anti-Zionists’ position is not our subject, and any attempt to elucidate it stirs such vast muddy waters as to make the attempt unwise, short of a volume. If mistaken, it was at least understandable, though it puzzled Balfour. He felt that the assimilationists’ fears that a return to Palestine would “adversely affect their position in the country of their adoption” were groundless. On the contrary, he said, “ancient antipathies” would be lessened only by giving the Jews “that which all other nations possess: a local habitation and a national home.”

That much Balfour accomplished, and he rated it above
all else in the fifty-year career that had taken him to the pinnacle of government. “Near the end of his days,” reports Mrs. Dugdale, “he said to me that on the whole he felt that what he had been able to do for the Jews had been the thing he looked back upon as the most worth his doing.” The burden of the past must have weighed heavily in Balfour’s estimate. There was more to it than the satisfaction of righting an old wrong. He felt (one can only suppose) that a special dignity attached to this one act out of all his life’s work, when for a moment he had walked in the footsteps of the ancestral heroes of the Old Testament.

The popular legend that England’s promise of a “National Home” for the Jews in Palestine, as incorporated in the Balfour Declaration, was a reward to Dr. Weizmann for his solution of the acetone shortage is attractively simple but totally inadequate. Responsibility for it rests with Lloyd George, whose War
Memoirs
record how he proposed to recommend Dr. Weizmann for some honor, how Weizmann demurred, how Lloyd George asked: “Is there nothing we can do as recognition of your valuable assistance to the country?” and how Weizmann answered: “Yes, I would like you to do something for my people.” This, remarks Lloyd George with a flourish, was the “fount and origin” of the Balfour Declaration.

No doubt the conversation took place, but the “fount and origin” was not in this chivalric episode, but in the hard facts of the war in the Middle East.

The world had gone to war in August 1914. Last-ditch English diplomacy tried hard to secure Turkish neutrality, but the Turks openly joined the Central Powers late in October, having in fact been in secret alliance with Germany for some months. The break was finally made; Lord
Salisbury’s harsh judgment of long ago—“we put our money on the wrong horse”—was proved only too true; the wrong horse was now racing in German silks. The Allies, England, France, and Russia declared war on Turkey, November 2–5, England incidentally allowing herself the small comfort of annexing Cyprus. Two weeks later English forces from India took Basra on the Persian Gulf and began the advance toward Bagdad in a general movement to close in on the Turks from the East.

The crucial point, however, was of course the Suez Canal, the hinge on which hung the British Empire. Reinforcements were hurriedly sent out just in time to meet the Turkish troops who had crossed the Sinai Peninsula and launched their attack on the Canal in February 1915. Though thrown back, they remained a threat that was to make the Middle East a major theater of war from then on. The strategy enthusiastically urged by Winston Churchill, seconded by Kitchener and Lloyd George, focused on the Middle East as
the
major theater of English effort, especially in view of the deadlock on the Western front. The Dardanelles campaign was a famous failure. It did not succeed in taking Constantinople or bringing assistance to Russia by the back door. But the land campaigns in Mesopotamia and later in Palestine eventually, after four years of sieges, attacks, and stalled operations, rolled the Turks back, out of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, back into Turkey proper. On the Mesopotamian front the British succeeded in taking Bagdad in March 1917, but their advance up the Tigris and Euphrates was halted when their Russian allies, supposed to be flanking the Turks from the north, melted away after the Revolution. Meanwhile the other movement, based on Egypt, began the advance into Syria in December 1916. The British after laying a railroad and a pipeline across the Sinai desert, took El Arish and crossed into Palestine. At Gaza on the border, where the Turks had been reinforced by German troops, the British twice met defeat, but at last, after a six months stalemate
and a regrouping under a new commander, General Allenby, they took the town of Samson’s tragic triumph. Jaffa, where Richard forced the beachhead long ago, was taken next, then Jerusalem in December 1917, and ultimately Damascus, Homs, and Aleppo, until all of Syria was in Allied hands.

Behind and between these military campaigns were carried on some of the war’s most complicated, entangled, and mutually conflicting diplomatic maneuvers, of the kind that so disgusted President Wilson with secret covenants secretly arrived at.

This was the moment for which the eagles had gathered. The Turkish carcass was about to be distributed. Russia, France, and England each had claims; and meanwhile two new parties had entered the picture: the Jews and the Arabs, with ambitions of their own that were being simultaneously encouraged by Britain for various strategic reasons. Everybody was negotiating with somebody, and nobody held all the strings in any one hand at any one time. The Foreign Office was negotiating with France and Russia. The War Office was negotiating with the Arabs, sometimes with one set, sometimes with another, sometimes through the Arab Bureau at Cairo, sometimes through Colonel Lawrence in the field. The Zionists were negotiating with various Cabinet members in London. A crisscross of secret treaties, pledges, promises, and “understandings” were made which have never since been satisfactorily untangled. It would be foolish as well as futile to attempt to extract a basic British policy out of this mess. There was no single clear policy except to win the war and to emerge from it as firmly intrenched in the Middle East as possible. This was the goal that the British were pursuing by whatever pragmatic means seemed necessary at the moment or seemed advisable to a particular negotiator in his particular task.

One of the wordiest quarrels of our time—and one of the saddest—has been the result. Endless disputation by opposing
groups among the British, by Arabs and Zionists and anti-Zionists, by White Papers, by the Permanent Mandates Commission, by some seventeen Commissions of Inquiry; hours, even weeks, of Parliamentary debate, countless books, columns in the press, reports, mass meetings, legal briefs, have all quite failed to pin down for history exactly what the British intended the future fate of Palestine to be. The fact is they hardly knew themselves. They certainly intended that Palestine should come under British control and that France should be kept out. But as to what form that control should take they were never too specific. They rather hoped that time would work it out. Meanwhile the various negotiators each followed his own bent. What Colonel Lawrence intended was rather more sweeping than what his chief at the Arab Bureau, Sir Henry MacMahon, intended; what Sir Mark Sykes intended was never entirely clear to anybody for long and tended to veer according to whether he was dealing with the French, the Arabs, or the Zionists; nor are we quite sure that what the Foreign Secretary intended was what the Prime Minister intended. Indeed, we can be sure that it was not. Balfour’s eye was on the revival of Israel, Lloyd George’s on containing the French.

All that we can tell is what happened. At the outbreak of war Sir Herbert Samuel, the future first high commissioner for Palestine, was a member of Asquith’s government. According to his account he felt it incumbent on himself, as the first Jewish Cabinet minister, to learn about the Zionist movement, and after some study he emerged favorably disposed. In November 1914, after the Turks’ entrance into the war, he talked over the possibilities with Sir Edward Grey, then foreign secretary, and Lloyd George, then at the Exchequer. He argued that England should take the lead in supporting the project because the geographical situation of Palestine made it important to the British Empire to have friendly inhabitants there. Grey showed “a strongly sentimental attraction” for the
plan and Lloyd George was “very keen” on it. The advisability of securing Russia’s support in an attempt to regain for the hard-pressed Czar the loyalty of the Russian Jews was discussed, likewise the probable attitude of France. Grey warned that when France came to put forward her claims in Syria, Britain should be careful not to acquiesce in any that might be “inconsistent with the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.” The wording shows that these earliest talks were in terms of a “state,” not a “home.”

On the strength of this conversation Grey, through his ambassador in Petrograd, asked for the support of the Russian government, but received no encouragement. Meanwhile there entered into the act one who was to play a galvanizing yet a background role: C. P. Scott, the respected editor of the
Manchester Guardian
. He had met Weizmann shortly after the outbreak of war, had acquainted himself thoroughly with the Zionist aims, and quietly but persistently thereafter saw to it that Weizmann and his colleagues met the key people in Whitehall; and his paper kept the problem in the public mind. In December Scott brought Weizmann to London to meet Lloyd George and Samuel.